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The Commute

Adam Van Brimmer is the editorial page editor at the Savannah Morning News. His twice-each-weekday microblog, The Commute, offers insights and analysis to consider on your morning and afternoon drives – and the times in between

Posted March 21, 2010 10:46 pm

Obituary: Video rental stores

If the closing of two stores on the islands is any indication, the corner video rental store is going the way of the neighborhood butcher shop.

The demise was inevitable. With cable and satellite providers offering on-demand movies, the rise of Internet streaming and the success of companies like Netflix, the Blockbusters, Movie Galleries and Hollywood Videos of the world have been endangered for a few years now.

And now for the more casual movie renters – who were keeping the rental stores afloat – there is Redbox. These video vending machines charge a dollar a day and are positioned outside grocery and drug stores. They are cheap and convenient.

So sound the TAPS for the rental stores.

Some would classify the demise as sad. And for the small local stores, I agree. They will adapt, offering hard-to-find titles and other niche services. But it’s hard to feel sorry for the big boys, places that for years bilked us out of late fees, rewind fees and never had the movie you really wanted to rent in stock.

The baffling thing to me is the failure of these companies to adjust. That sounds strange – OK, ridiculous – from somebody who works in the newspaper business, but we have at least tried to adjust our business model.

Then again, unlike our business, which will always have value and be viable in some format, video rental stores will soon be obsolete. They offer nothing that a customer can’t get somewhere else.

It makes you wonder why Blockbuster or Movie Gallery weren’t the ones to introduce the vending machine idea. Better to compete with yourself for a while why you transition to the next big thing then to let somebody else put you out of business.

Instead Redbox was started by McDonald’s, refined by Coinstar (famous for those coin-counting machines at the supermarket) and is run by one of Netflix’s cofounders.

What do you think of the video store demise? And do you see some revenue streams these companies may have missed?